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Flash Fiction Friday: Big Thanks for Little Soup

by Miles Skelton

There once lived a little bird in a little house. In his little house, he had a little straw bed, a little iron stove, and a little wooden table. The little bird enjoyed nothing more than cooking little soups for his little bird friends. When his soups were almost ready, he would tweet into his little telephone. So delicious were his little soups, all his friends flew swiftly over. Sitting down at his little table, they would tweet their big thanks for his little soup.

Unlike people parties, where one big soup is made for a big group of people, the little bird made a personal soup for each little bird friend. He made pea soup for the green bird, carrot soup for the orange bird, chicken noodle soup for the yellow bird, and tomato soup for the red bird. For himself, the little bird filled a little bowl with one spoonful of each of the four soups to make a brown soup, for he was a brown bird.

One day, the little bird was rushing about to set the little table for his little soup party when a gust of wind blew some leaves into the little house. The little bird spread his wings over the little soup bowls so the leaves did not blow into the soup. When the leaves settled, the little bird lowered his wings, but it was impossible to tell the soups apart, for in his haste, the little bird had spilled a little of each soup into the other soups. The pea soup, the carrot soup, the chicken noodle soup, and the tomato soup were as brown as the brown soup he made for himself. There was no time to remake the little soups. He had already tweeted his friends on his telephone. They would arrive any minute.

There was a peck at the door. They were already here. The little bird did not even have time to sweep up the windblown leaves. He scooped up the leaves and looked about the little house for an empty shelf or perhaps a cupboard where he could store the leaves, when he realized there were exactly four leaves. One leaf was green, another was orange, another was yellow, and last there was red. Quickly, the little bird set the four leaves in four of the little soup bowls. He had gone through such effort to prevent the leaves from falling into the soup, and here he was placing them in the soup bowls with gusto. Even if his little friends did not enjoy leaf soup, at least the colors matched.

The little bird scurried to the door and welcomed in his little friends. They took their usual places at the little table, and gave their big thanks for the little soup in their usual manner. When the little bird’s friends raised their four little spoons, the little bird raised his too. The little bird thought that all was in the clear. It wasn’t the type or taste that mattered, only the color. But of course he would think that. His little soup did not have a leaf for a cover.

Before any of them had tasted their leafy leaf soup, the little bird’s friends set down their spoons. “I guess we’re not hungry today,” they said.

The little bird let out a squawk, and in his moment of doubt, he thought of a thing to make all the day’s problems go away. He asked his four little friends to pass around his little bowl and share his little brown soup with him.

And when the little bowl of brown soup was empty, the little bird’s friends folded their wings into megaphones and loudly thanked the little bird for the best soup they had ever tasted. They passed their little bowls of leaf soup around the little table until each of them had enjoyed each other’s soup.

Miles Skelton grew up in the desert. Now he lives by the ocean. This is his first published story.

Armadillos and Beer

by Sam Reeve

I was thinking about CM3′s recent book, Armadillo Fists, which made me want to look up pictures of cute little armadillos. Then I started to see a lot of pictures like this:

And apparently, this is a real thing. I don’t fully understand how or why people started this, and maybe it’s just because I’m an ignorant Canadian, but if you care to explain, please do so!

BONUS:

Thirsty Thursday: Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale

Bizarro Central is very pleased to announce a new weekly feature: THIRSTY THURSDAY! Every Thursday, beer enthusiast and editor extraordinaire Ross E. Lockhart will review a craft beer and suggest possible book pairings.
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A Review of Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale by Ross E. Lockhart

Feet. Amazing things, aren’t they? They’re a ticklish subject, and it’s true we walk all over them, but without our feet, without those seven tarsal bones, five metatarsals, and fourteen phalanges (not to mention the tiny sesamoid bone in the big toe), we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

Feet are very much a part of our cultural identity and language. If doubt causes you to abandon your plans, then you’ve got cold feet (thank author Stephen Crane, and his novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, for that one). Soldiers during the Civil War marched to a chant of “hay foot, straw foot” because they didn’t know right from left. Some refer to their feet as “dogs,” as in “my dogs are tired,” which comes from Cockney slang rhyming “feet” with “meat” as in “dogs’ meat.” When someone dies, we bury them six feet deep. If your arch collapses, you’ve got flat feet, but if you’ve got flat feet, you’re likely disqualified to be a police officer, also known as a flatfoot. “Footy” is a desirable characteristic in exotic cheeses. Beer, not so much. Don’t even get me started on the foot fetishists (you know who you are).

And even though there are twelve inches in a foot, some feet are bigger than others.

Which brings me to Bigfoot. Also known as Sasquatch, the Redneck cousin to the Tibetan Yeti—better known as Abominable Snowmen—and mysterious Mi-go (those fun guys from Yuggoth), Bigfoot is perhaps the best-known American cryptid. Big, hairy, ape-like, and notoriously difficult to photograph clearly, Bigfoot wanders the Pacific Northwest on his six-toed, two-foot feet, confounding cryptozoologists and monster truck enthusiasts since the early 1920s.

Commemorating the big brute, Chico, CA’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has come up with Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale, a gold medal-winning barleywine boasting “a dense, fruity bouquet, an intense flavor palate, and a deep reddish-brown color” with “big maltiness balanced by a wonderfully bittersweet hoppiness.” Sounds delicious, but I’m used to barleywines like Lagunitas Olde GnarleyWine and Stone Old Guardian. Let’s see how this one stacks up.

Bigfoot pours a bright, outstandingly clear burnished copper with a thin white-tan head that quickly dissipates, but leaves clumpy, abstract bas-reliefs of lacing on the glass. Toasted malt, caramel, and earthy yeasts on the nose, with aspects of fresh pine cones and lemon peel. Pine and citrus hops on the tongue, aggressively bitter, with notes of sweet caramel and English toffee tempering and evening out the bitter bite of the hops. Warm alcohol is very noticeable… but at 9.6% ABV, it ought to be. Mouthfeel is smooth and creamy, with plenty of carbonation, complex and peppery against the back of the throat, and a dry finish that leaves you wanting more.

Enjoy your Adult Beverages with some high-quality reading? Here are a few suggested literary pairings:

Fistful of Feet by Jordan Krall – The seminal Bizarro Spaghetti Western, combining mysterious gunslingers, Cthulhu-worshiping Indians, and sexually-transmitted tattoos.

Enormity by W. G. Marshall – The strange tale of Manny, an American working in Korea, whose job, failed marriage, and small stature conspire to make him feel puny and insignificant… until a quantum explosion happens, and Manny awakens to discover that he is now bigger than life, a mile-high colossus.

Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir by Graham Roumieu – A touching memoir by the Big Guy, which shows that even though he’s bigger, hairier, and stinkier than humanity, he’s really the same, deep down inside.

Cum for Bigfoot (The Monster Sex Series) by Virginia Wade – I haven’t read this, but with a title like Cum for Bigfoot, and a synopsis that reads, “what begins as a flirty, fun filled trip soon turns into a nightmare, when an ape-like creature kidnaps a group of teen girls with the purpose of procreating with them,” how could you possibly go wrong?

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Ross E. Lockhart is the managing editor of Night Shade Books. A lifelong fan of supernatural, fantastic, speculative, and weird fiction, he holds degrees in English from Sonoma State University (BA) and San Francisco State University (MA). He lives in an old church in Petaluma, CA, with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and a small, ravenous dog that he believes may be one of the Elder Gods. In 2011, he edited the acclaimed anthology The Book of Cthulhu. Visit him online at www.haresrocklots.com.

Perilous Press: Godfathers of Fail

by Cody Goodfellow

Thirteen years ago, I wrote my first novel. It was a masterpiece. All my friends said so. But I couldn’t get any publishers to accept it. Or reject it. Or read it. Or reply to my query letters.

“Fuck ‘em, dude,” my best friend said, “let’s put it out ourselves.”

Anyone who’s ever broken stuff they cared about while throwing a temper tantrum should see that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Back in 1998, self-publishing wasn’t even a dirty word, or the expensive method of career suicide that it would soon become, let alone a viable business model. But when my excellent friend Adam Barnes suggested that we set up a publishing company to put out my epic first novel, then still in progress, as a pair, if not a trilogy, and market them ourselves, it was far from the dumbest idea I was willing to say yes to. I had nothing to lose.

For several years, I’d tried and failed to sell my short fiction. I didn’t have internet access, and used the Writer’s Market to find listings. Most of the markets I subbed to were gone by the time they got my manuscripts, and the rest were content to send back earnest, if contemptuous, critiques that seemed to be about someone else’s work altogether. The notion that my work was still raw and yet already rotten had occurred to me, but my solution was to bypass the little leagues and try to write a gigantic motherfucker of a novel that paid back all my influences while fusing them into something new. I was crazy in love with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but instead of copying his antiquated approach, I wanted to modernize it and use the kind of genre-mashing techniques Lovecraft pioneered to make cosmic horror relevant and scary again. I had reached the point where I needed to know, if I did exactly what I wanted to do with my writing, would anyone want to read it?

I didn’t know anybody in the field, and had only sold work to a roleplaying game company (who would not put it out for another decade) and Substance, a CD-ROM magazine founded by college friends who earned write-ups in Mondo 2000, Spin and Playboy, then just as quickly ran their innovative new media miracle into the ground.

I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t trust anybody, and I didn’t believe that my work would get a fair reading at any of the New York publishers. If I couldn’t make anybody read my short stories, what chance at a fair hearing did I have with a novel? So self-publishing seemed like the only viable alternative. And anyway, it wasn’t really self-publishing… my lawyer was doing it.

It seemed like a brilliant solution. We would put out exactly the book I wanted, and I would know if I was destined to write for a living, or to run a children’s shoe store.

I had just finished writing Radiant Dawn when Adam hit me with his idea. He had moved up to Seattle after college to become a probate attorney, while I went back to San Diego to work at a B&N, start a family and slowly sink into a slough of despond. While neither of us had any publishing experience, Adam and I shared a nuclear contempt for 99.9% of everything, so when he told me he’d be willing to partner up with me to put out the book and its inevitable sequel, I thought we had an unbeatable plan. I would make them wish they’d exploited me when they had the chance.

We proofed and formatted the manuscript ourselves. I did the cover design and had my friend Scott Riggs slap it together in Photoshop. We found a good offset printer and Adam put up the funds to print 2500 copies. We weren’t sure it would be enough.

The results were… discouraging.

Adam submitted the book to Ingram and Baker & Taylor, only to find they had a Byzantine approval regimen that kept us sending review copies and waiting to hear nothing, because they kept replacing each rep we dealt with, paying them in a generous severance package of wagonloads of unread book submissions.

Getting reviews was even tougher. My hometown paper sent a withering gob of condescension and sold my review copy to a local used bookstore, which sold it back to me for a buck. To get Cinescape Online to review it, I had to agree to review a shitty X-Files ripoff called Freakylinks, which mercifully got cancelled after five episodes.

But even more maddening were the rarefied specks of encouragement that kept us struggling. We didn’t know any famous horror or sci-fi writers to tap for a blurb, but through a lucky chain of acquaintances, we managed to get the book in front of Jack Olson, the “dean of true crime writers.” With nothing to recommend us and no reason to spend his precious time reading my grotty manuscript (he died only two years later), he not only read the book, but surpassed our wildest dreams of hubris with the kind of praise that should’ve cracked the heavens and made it rain sales.

Adam entered the book in a competition that looked at all small press works, some 80% of which were nonfiction memoirs and how-to books. The judges mostly gave it high marks and one of them loved it, but one clown trolled it to death, even on criteria for which a novel should’ve been excused. On the back of her form, she added the comment “derivative pseudo-sci-fi” by way of explanation. Adam assured me this was exactly the kind of hate we should be hoping for. The Edsel failed because nobody particularly loved or hated it, at first. A polarized reaction like this was exactly what we needed.

As much shit as we all love to throw at the corporate big box stores, the B&N I worked at gave me more love and support than I deserved. The first articulate, glowing review on Amazon of RD1 was written by an assistant manager, and my boss Pat Gasior ordered a box for the store and let me do a reading on a Saturday night.

It was a triumph. All my friends and family turned out, and because I was in the middle of the store shouting out profane body horror nonsense, a huge crowd had gathered by the time I was done. A fistfight almost broke out when some guy started screaming at me about all the F-bombs I dropped, and people who didn’t even hear the reading came over and bought copies, just to piss the idiot off.

We thought we won.

When reviews finally began to come in a year after we needed them, they gave the worst kind of praise. A guy at Talebones had doubted the book would be worth his time, but then admitted it was better than most of the mainstream stuff he’d read lately. His only gripe was that the book ended in a cliffhanger and promised the sequel in 2000, which by then had come and gone. Where was the sequel?

Our flawless business model had always decreed that we would finance the second book with the revenues from the first, right after we each got a flying hot tub limousine. By then, I had begun RD2, but neither of us could convince our wives that the best way to detonate our unexploded bomb would be with another, bigger bomb. Adam had put up the money for RD1 and his garage was now the Perilous Press fulfillment annex. It was my turn to pony up for printing.

Thanks to internet-based research, RD2 was almost twice as long as RD1, but the real reason was that I was more or less sure by then it would be the last book I’d ever write. Nobody knew who I was, nobody cared, and the people closest to me were only suffering for my delusions of grandeur. I had to put it all down for one last spin and assure myself that I’d left no turn unstoned before I retired to a life of seriously bitter retail mismanagement.

The freight company delivered RD2 to my parent’s semirural hilltop compound in Lakeside in Summer 2003, and we stomped black widows and baby scorpions to stack the cartons into a rusty cargo container just like the one Storch escaped from in the first book, now christened the Perilous Fullfillment Annex II.

The second book got half as many reviews as the first. What the hell was wrong with the reading public? Our books were awesome, and they were clearly worlds away from the iUniverse and Publish America shit that was starting to show up everywhere.

With no other options, I started to look seriously at the possibility that it wasn’t the rest of the world fucking up my program. All along, it had been my friends who had believed in me and supported my crazy dreams. To get this shit to go over, I simply had to make more friends.

I also started to realize that maybe I should learn to write short stories. I signed up for a UCSD Extension class taught by the inimitable Nancy Holder. I learned the basic elements of a working short story and wrote a bunch of stuff in that class that I immediately sold to magazines. I also made friends like Eunice Magill, a feisty badass middle school teacher who convinced me to attend World Horror in Phoenix in 2004.

There, I met John Skipp and gave him a copy of a chapbook novella prequel to Radiant Dawn that made him my slave. I also met Carlton Mellick III, Rose O’Keefe, Jeremy Robert Johnson, and Jason from Night Shade, as well as a horde of folks who were trying to do what we were doing, without blowing as much of their own money as we had.

Every book on writing assures you that professionals don’t rely on friends for criticism, and common sense wisdom warns against doing business with friends, if you want to stay friends. But my friends have given me the strength to keep at it until I was able to convince people who weren’t my friends that my work wasn’t a waste of their time. Skipp was moved to write a huge, slap-happy alert to the world that my shit was ripe and red hot. It ran in Cemetery Dance alongside “Burning Names,” a story I’d written in Nancy’s class. Like a molasses glacier moving uphill, we finally began to make progress.

We had never intended to use Perilous purely as a vanity press, but we never recouped our initial investment, so the company kind of drifted like a spent booster module until a few years ago, when we hooked up with S.T. Joshi and set out to revive the press as a vendor of other people’s works.

Our focus was to be modern cosmic horror. Lovecraft in his day was a true Bizarro godfather: a self-taught eccentric who acquired only a scattered cult of followers in his lifetime. His best work turned horror on its head, replacing the supernatural with sci-fi materialism, trashing outmoded concepts of good and evil and demoting humanity to its proper place in an infinite, uncaring universe. The pulp markets barely kept him in navy beans, and he died at 47 from undiagnosed bowel cancer, long before his young friend August Derleth founded Arkham House to publish his work.

While the Cthulhu Mythos has exploded into a plethora of cults and sub-cultures, it still lurks well out of the mainstream, less a stylistic contrivance than a mass mental illness that even sane, talented professional writers cannot resist indulging. More confrontational and confounding at its best than mainstream horror, modern Mythos fiction strives for a chilling atmosphere of pervasive weirdness, instead of cathartic gross-outs or reactionary doses of poetic justice, and so is a closer cousin to Bizarro than almost anything else out there.

We’ve put out fancy limited yet affordable illustrated hardcover editions by Michael Shea and Brian Stableford, but taking a page from the Eraserhead Press model, we’ve also started to do slim POD paperbacks. It’s no more of a business winner than when I put out my own shit, but we’ve come to realize writing and publishing books is no more a rational choice than reading, and yet we’re powerless to stop. We’re committed to losing money making the kind of things we’d love to read, rather than trying to make something just to sell it.

We get fewer submissions than any other small press, and we put out fewer releases than any publisher that hasn’t died (well, twice as many as Swallowdown last year). But we love what we do, and we love the friends who’ve enabled us to do it.

In spite of everything, God damn it, we’re winning.

Cody Goodfellow is the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of Perfect Union, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Radiant Dawn, Ravenous Dusk, Spore and Jake’s Wake (both with John Skipp), and All Monster Action! (forthcoming from Swallowdown Press). His short stories have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best Horror of the Year Volume Three, G.I. Joe: Tales from the Cobra Wars, Classics Mutilated, The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple), and Cemetery Dance.

RIP Barney Rosset

Barney Rosset, publishing maverick and owner of Grove Press, has died at 89. In his time as a publisher, Rosset went to court several times over obscenity charges, first for Lady Chatterly’s Lover, then for Tropic of Cancer, then for Naked Lunch, and more. Without Rosset and Grove Press, much of the bizarro fiction we love so dearly would be deemed obscene. To sell such contraband would be to face potential jail time. Booksellers were declared “smut peddlers” for carrying titles that, in some cases, are considered classics today.

In honor of the life of Barney Rosset, read an obscene book today. Go up on the rooftop and shout Naked Lunch to the stars. If the sky is cloudy where you’re from, put some Ass Goblins in the one you love. Or take this opportunity to dig through the Grove Press catalog and discover a new favorite. Rosset was a notorious drinker, so perhaps enjoying a beer in his name will do. However it suits you, today let us celebrate the battles won in the name of fucked up literature.

We salute you, Barney. Surely there’s a place for you in Punk Heaven.

On a side note, Rosset was also the subject of a fascinating and inspiring documentary, Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press, that should be required viewing for all potential publishers. It’s easy to track down, if you’re so inclined.

Nine Inch Nails vs. Chuck E Cheese

by Tracy Vanity

I don’t know how this guy got a hold of an animatronic band…there’s a Chuck E Cheese meets Meet the Feebles vibe going on there. His site didn’t provide any details other than you can “bid” to have your favorite song “Rock-afired” and apparently some NIN fans put in a bid and then this happened:

Needless to say, I just replayed that about 50 times.

Interview Outtake with Justin Grimbol

Justin Grimbol is a funny, funny man with a relaxed, Zen take on life. He’s one of those people who can look at the world and see the amusing, strange and hilarious bits, and then bring those bits home to his readers. Grimbol’s most recent book, The Crud Masters, is an excellent example of this.

In the outtakes from the interview I conducted with him, Justin talks about how, if the tech existed, he’d modify his body, and what kind of flag he envisions for this year’s New Bizarro Authors.

In the Crud Masters, some characters modify their bodies in a variety of ways. If you were a moddy, how would you be modified and why?

I once knew this guy who had born with a bunch of extra nipples and fingers and toes (the extra toes and fingers had been removed but the scars were still there). He even had a tail. The guy just looked bigger than most men. He looked like he had spent and eternity in his mother’s womb growing all sorts of extra things. He once told me he had two dicks. I believed him. I was so excited to know a man that had two dicks. It was like getting to meet the real Santa Clause. Life was filled with magic and possibility again. Then he told me he was just fucking with me, that he only had one cock. I was heartbroken. I almost cried.

So that’s what I would want. I would want a second dick—-For sentimental reasons.

The Crud Masters use a pair of dirty panties for a flag. If this year’s NBAS had a flag, what would it be?

A picture of us dressed up as the characters from Young Guns. Troy would be Billy the kid. Spike, you can be Chaves Y Chaves, cause you’re so mysterious. I would be Dirty Steve. I want to be Doc, but I would be probably be Dirty Steve. I wish I could be both. S.d Foster would be Doc Holiday. Constance would be Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh, the wise ass played by Christian Slater in the sequel. Eric Beeny would be Charley. Michael Allen Rose would be Richard Brewer. Vince Kramer is Pat Garrett. Only in our version Pat Garrett never betrays Billy the Kid and nobody dies and they go on being badass forever.And I think the picture should be glow in the dark. And I think it should be a hologram.

________________________
For seven weeks
, each of the other authors in the NBAS 2011-2012 will be featured on my blog at spikemarlowe.wordpress.com; each week a New Bizzaro Author will be highlighted. On Mondays, I’ll post a review of the author of the week’s book, on Wednesdays I’ll post an author interview, and on Fridays I’ll post an amazing piece of writing by the featured author.

What’s even better is that, each week, Bizarro Central will post exclusive outtakes from the interviews. These outtakes will give you a special look at each author’s unique personality and provide special insight into their books.

The rest of Justin Grimbol’s interview will be available on my blog Wednesday, February 22nd. You can’t miss it; it’s HILARIOUS.

Dilation Exercise 37

Below you’ll find Alan M. Clark’s weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture, read the caption, above and below the image, and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If the artwork inspires a story, please use the comment feature to tell us something about it. Need a further explanation? Go to Imagination Workout—The Dilation Exercises.

Their argument had raged for days; the world was now a desolate ruin, and Pokeany, Shoveany, Punchany, and Kickany were dead.

“Don’t walk away from me when I’m burning words with you!” Stompany shouted, but Bludgeany knew that words were all they had left.

Artwork: “Antag/Protag” copyright © 1996 Alan M. Clark.
Interior illustration for Imagination Fully Dilated, Volume II edited by Elizabeth Engstrom – IFD Publishing. Later used as cover art for Slag Attack by Andersen Prunty – Eraserhead Press.

Captions are original to this post and have nothing to do with the literary project with which the artwork first appeared.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Naked Noir: A Review and Reflection on Laura Lee Bahr’s Haunt and Bizarro Noir

by Garrett Cook

When you put a trenchcoat and fedora on a character, it does something to who they are. They’re a detective, they’re a gangster, they’re a loner. These trappings change your perceptions of a person, of what they do and what they’ll get into. It’s a shortcut, maybe a shallow visual cue. I poke fun at this and examine this at the same time in my book Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective, a book that’s about whether we are what we look like or what body we’re in or what clothes we wear or even, in the case of fictional characters, which ones they’re dressed in. Sometimes that’s the only indication of a genre we have. A lot of the time genre itself is just a costume we slap on a piece of fiction.

Laura Lee Bahr’s Haunt is a Bizarro novel and a noir underneath its clothes, but something really interesting is going on, something you don’t see that often in crime fiction. While Haunt features a private dick, a femme fatale and a man obsessed who must confront his dark side, she doesn’t use these as a veneer. It’s noir whose trappings are what they are, whose strangeness is unabashedly what it is, pervading the architecture of the book and the voice of its narrators. It’s surreal, it’s transgressive and its more strange than it is anything else, but its strangeness and its noir-ness become one in ways you seldom see.

This is a traitorous whore of a book, a femme fatale that puts Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Joan Bennett to shame. It switches protagonists. It switches storylines. It’s not just the basic vicissitudes of plot or the revelation of facts. It outright turns on you. It’s turned on its author it seems. Bahr has blended fiction and lying. You are, like the book’s heroes part of its intrigues and the author might well be too. Noir is about shadows and identity schemes and broken confidences and people facing up to their dark sides. This is Bizarro noir that isn’t wearing a trench coat or anything at all.

Haunt is a book that doesn’t require a lot of violence, a lot of detective work, gangsters or grit. The violence occurs at the emotional and narrative level. It hurts the brain and it hurts the heart of the protagonist and the reader alike who have become one. I’m reminded of Frank Zappa’s statement “I don’t  do drugs. I am drugs.” It’s made of hurt and enigmas. Which is an impressive feat to say the least.

Bizarro noir is already a fine tradition. It comes out of a fine cinematic tradition, films like Mark Damon’s The Seventh Victim, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet  and Alex Proyas’ Dark City. Jordan Krall’s books alone are enough to validate the subgenre, but others came before it and more will come after it.  Haunt fits in with these films and with this tradition and reminds us why the two go together. Bizarro and noir are both at some level about reality being unreliable. They  both involve emotions and ideas becoming realities and changing
the physics of one’s universe. Naked, proud, honest weird noir Haunt reveals these connections and uses them the best they can be used.

________________
Garrett Cook is the author of Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective and Archelon Ranch

Laura Lee Bahr’s HAUNT is available on amazon now!

“DEMONS” Up For a Stoker Award! Bizarros Rejoice!

This morning, the Horror Writers Association announced their official ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards. And my DEMONS anthology made the list.

I don’t know if this is the first time a Bizarro author got nominated for a Stoker, but it’s certainly the MOST Bizarro authors ever nominated in one fell swoop.
So congrats to LAURA LEE BAHR, CODY GOODFELLOW, VIOLET LaVIOT, CARLTON MELLICK III, J. DAVID OSBORNE, JAMES STEELE, and ATHENA VILLAVERDE, who brought the mad Bizarro flavah to the book, and held their own with Neil Gaiman, William Peter Blatty, and the rest of the fancy gang.
LOVE YOU GUYS!
Yer pal,
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